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Friday, February 9, 1912: I am disgusted with the marks I made in my examination, but although my marks are low I am not losing faith for I can truthfully say, “I didn’t cheat.” I had not much of a desire to cheat after that awful lecture and what desire I had left I managed to trample down. I intend to improve for next month and make my next teacher happy. Jake is going to stay one week longer.

Recent photo of building that once housed McEwensville School.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

In January Grandma got caught cheating. Even though these events happened a hundred years ago and logically it makes no sense—I feel bad that Grandma wasn’t rewarded with good grades when she studied hard.

Jake was Grandma’s teacher. It sounds like he was quitting and that she was soon going to have a new teacher.

Grandma indicated that she was going to continue studying hard to impress her new teacher. Hmm . . . I can’t help wondering if she might have failed to trample all temptation at some point and “tested” her new teacher to see if he let her get away with cheating.

[…] teacher caught her cheating in late January—and she did not cheat when she took her tests in February. It’s too bad that her grades didn’t reflect her better behavior—though I suppose they more […]

Hello

I look forward to sharing my grandmother's diary with relatives and friends. Helena Muffly (Swartz) kept a diary from 1911-1914. She was 15 years old when she began this diary. I plan to post these entries one day at a time—exactly 100 years after she wrote them. I hope you enjoy this glimpse back to a slower paced time.

The header is a picture of the farm where my grandmother lived when she wrote this diary. It is located in Northumberland County in central Pennsyvlania about a mile outside of McEwenvsille. My father said that the buildings look similar to what they looked like when he was a child.